sociology as a science Flashcards
socio is a science - postivists
society = objective factual reality - a real ‘thing’ made up of social facts that exists independently of individuals and these facts can be discovered through application of scientific methods to society.
positivists use inductive method to discover social facts - examine data first, then create theory, theory needs to be verified and only then is it accepted as a social fact - verificationism. social facts and patterns can then be used to improve society.
positivists also believe researchers should be detached and objective from subject matter and not allow personal values to interfere with research
socio is a science - realism
keat and urry
open system - researcher can’t control and measure all relevant variables
relativism - sociologists study open system where processes are too complex to make exact predictions, similarly they claim that natural scientists often assume existence of unobservable structures so if natural scientists can study unobservable phenomena then so can sociologists so natural and social sciences attempt to explain causes of events in terms of underlying structures and processes. even though these structures are unobservable, we can work out they exist by observing their effects on people’s lives
socio is not a science - kuhn
for something to be a science it must have a paradigm - accepted set of ideas in a field of what should be studied and how it should be studied.
sociology has conflicting perspectives so there is disagreement between and within perspectives - no paradigm so sociology isn’t a science - sociology is in pre scientific stage as there’s no central paradigm accepted by all sociologists
socio is not a science - interpretivism
sociology not a science as subject matter studied is completely different to that of natural sciences as human beings have consciousness and free will.
there are no social facts so they cannot be measured, there are only interactions created by humans which are based on meanings that we attach to situations we find ourselves in. if humans are studied scientifically you can’t understand meanings they attach to situations so human behaviour can only be studied by using qualitative methods
